Gen­eral’s Gaffe

It is un­for­tu­nate that Gen­eral V. K. Singh has in­ad­ver­tently got em­broiled in an un­nec­es­sary con­tro­versy re­gard­ing the modus operandi of Army in­tel­li­gence work­ing in Jammu & Kash­mir (“Dirty Tricks”, Oc­to­ber 7). The gen­eral should have been more dis­creet and han­dled the mat­ter care­fully. Con­fi­den­tial is­sues re­lat­ing to na­tion’s se­cu­rity shouldn’t be dis­cussed in the me­dia. It can only harm the coun­try. R. D. SINGH, Am­bala V. K. Singh will go down in the mil­i­tary his­tory of In­dia as a petty gen­eral whose ac­tions threat­ened na­tional se­cu­rity. He mis­used se­cret ser­vice funds by play­ing dirty tricks, planned con­spir­a­cies, cre­ated a need­less age dis­pute to stay in ser­vice for one more year, scan­dalised the third largest stand­ing army in the world, den­i­grated politi­cians, dep­re­cated the ju­di­ciary and hob­nobbed with po­lit­i­cal par­ties. V. S. DHARMAKUMAR, Gur­gaon As an hon­est tax­payer, I want to know how my money is spent. The al­le­ga­tions made by Singh against the Army and politi­cians must be in­ves­ti­gated thor­oughly and the facts made pub­lic. The re­tired gen­eral must not leak se­lec­tive in­for­ma­tion but must come out in the open with the whole truth. AB­HI­LASH THAD­HANI, via email Your cover story on Gen­eral V. K. Singh is not fair to him. Not­with­stand­ing the fact that he have erred in re­act­ing to al­le­ga­tions and has brought sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion re­lated to the Tech­ni­cal Sup­port Di­vi­sion ( TSD) into the pub­lic do­main, it needs to be re­mem­bered that even though TSD was re­port­edly into covert op­er­a­tions, it would be ab­surd to sug­gest that th­ese were unau­tho­rised and had no sanc­tion from the Gov­ern­ment. Surely the gen­eral could not have formed such a unit on his own whim, with­out a di­rec­tive from the Min­istry of De­fence? AN­JUM M. SAMEL, Mum­bai

V. K. Singh, be­ing a re­tired gen­eral of the In­dian Army, should not act frivolously and en­dan­ger the se­cu­rity of the coun­try which is para­mount. The coun­try’s se­cu­rity should not be com­pro­mised upon by any­one for their per­sonal or pro­fes­sional am­bi­tions. It is clear that Singh re­sorted to th­ese tricks to at­tain his po­lit­i­cal goals. No se­cret in­for­ma­tion of na­tional im­por­tance should be di­vulged be­fore the me­dia. He must re­alise that no one stands to gain if the na­tion suf­fers. V. K. TAN­GRI, Dehradun